Prolegomena to an Art Theory of Event-Scape Architecture

Abstract

The theory of Meta-Morphology introduces the concept of
process patterns. The present contribution seeks to establish (some
preliminaries for) an art-theoretical foundation for the design of large
edifices of process patterns, or in other words, an Art Theory of
Event-Scape Architecture. With this term, we combine Virilio's description
of the Event-Landscape in his book by the same title, and Christopher
Alexander's
"A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art", which
analyses the pattern languages of ancient carpets. The purely metaphysical
concept of Virilio's event-landscapes is transformed into practical
graphical representations of process patterns that follow the style
patterns of oriental carpets. This approach had earlier antecedents: deeper
research into the culture-historical background of
Alexander's
work shows strong evidence that early
Islamic art employed techniques to empathically evoke visions of exactly the
(kind of) trans-temporal panorama of God's universe, which Virilio
depicts, and this was part of the success story of early Islamic religion. In
many respects, this visionary technique was quite alien to Christian occidental
mentality which remained bound to visual pictorial representations. (With the
possible exception of the spatio-iconography of gothic cathedrals). One could
say that this was the most successfully hidden deep secret of Islam. During the
decline of Islamic culture after about 1200, it seems to have become lost even
to Islamic culture itself. Alexander's
title:
"Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art" implies that this secret of early Islamic
Art is in the process of being rediscovered, as now the sciences and mathematics
have advanced to a level where the outcome of the pioneering work of
Al-Khwarizmi could be technologically spread to reach a large percentage of the
population. The technics of pro-gramma (or algorismus) have now
become common knowledge for a large percentage of the population. The "Art
Theory of Event-Scape Architecture" is also expected to bring practical
results, since computer software systems are large edifices of process patterns.
Here, a more powerful practical graphic representation of process
patterns would greatly enhance the control of the ever-increasing complexity
of software systems.

Keywords

1 Introduction

The present paper extends the thought lines presented in
earlier contributions to the CASYS conferences. For more introduction, reference
to Goppold
(2000a) and (2001a) is recommended. More
complete materials can be found under Goppold
(www).
The aim of the series is the development of a General Theory of Patterns
(GTP), or Meta-Morphology. Within the discourse of the CASYS conferences,
the Meta-Morphology series attempts to illuminate the philosophical,
mythological, biospheric and semiospheric depth-structures underlying the
present technological drive of humanity with relation to memory and
anticipation. These are in subjective terms, the two dimensions of
experienced temporality. (The present is only a virtual, fleeting, vanishing
point squeezed in between an endless expanse of past and future). The period of
the last 50 years of development of computing machinery is, in the history of
ideas, a technological breakthrough of what Hegel would have called: "Die
Objektivationen des Geistes". (The Hegelian term "Geist" is difficult to
translate into English since it hovers somewhere between, or above, spirit and
mind; and to really understand it, one first must understand Hegel).

1.1 DNA, Computing, Memory and Anticipation

It is more than a historical coincidence that the DNA
structure was presented as an analogy of a binary coded tape storage (derived
from the Turing Machine model), quite exactly around the time when the first
computers with tape-like storage devices appeared. Memory and
anticipation are key attributes of living organisms. A DNA structure is a
molecular memory device, and for a species, its DNA treasure (the genotype) is a
codification of anticipations of life situations that any single phenotype is
equipped to deal with in its future life trajectory. The elegance of the
mechanism can be appreciated by considering the many levels of indirection
through which it works. The DNA is the material carrier of a pattern that is
commonly called the genome. The first catch is that a gene does not normally
correspond to one single local sequence of nucleic acids (as a simplistic Turing
Machine subroutine would imply), rather to a pattern of several distantly
located sequences that are becoming operative only when they are simultaneously
activated. This pattern is transcribed first into RNA, then into amino acids,
and these form proteins. Here, we find a huge computational gap that is usually
glossed over in all simplistic renderings of the mechanism, since these proteins
are a 3-d structure that is formed through the protein folding mechanism.
This mechanism is computationally intractable. A chain of 100 amino acids would
need 1027 years of TM type computing to calculate its spatial
arrangement. (Barrow 1998: 105-106). To complicate, a bunch of proteins still
does not make a functioning organism. When we reach the protein level, it is
practically unavoidable to crash against the chicken-egg barrier. Because
without a fully functioning cell (and the ribosome mechanism before that) no
amount of proteins could be built up to produce a new cell. We finally reach the
level of the {conglomerate / colony} of living cells that is usually called an
organism. This organism finally displays all bodily and metabolic functions that
allow it to survive and reproduce in its natural environment. That is, its
bodily incorporation is a result of the patterns of anticipation resident in the
DNA which are commonly called its genes. If we compare this at least 4-levels
type of indirect anticipation with the rather direct example given in Dubois
(1998), of someone taking an umbrella along, because he expects the weather to
be rainy, then one may get a glimpse that nature still "has a few jokers up her
sleeve" that complicate the game considerably - to use an euphemism.

This being said, we return to the CASYS theme. Computing
devices introduce DNA-analogue facilities into the control of machinery. But
from the present perspective, as stated above, one should avoid the jump to the
inverse conclusion that an organism is "nothing but" a machinery device that is
blindly controlled by its DNA, "exactly like" a TM is controlled by its tape.
This is currently the vogue in a large consensus-circle of Neo-Darwinists whom
one could also call the "Dawkinists", after one of their most vociferous
proponents.

Computation is an objectivation of a hitherto very "geistig"
aspect of human experience, and it is therefore not only of technological
interest, but it also opens up new philosophical frontiers. Memory and
anticipation are coming into technological reach, and by this, into
scientific frameworks. From this vantage point, the CASYS conferences are an
intra-scientific attempt to break out from the linear, geometricized
time-concept of natural science that is bound to its effective causality
paradigm associated with the linear time concept of Newton and the spatialized
time concept of Einstein (the space-time continuum). But Einstein's concept
lacks memory. One could turn the argument around and say that without memory,
time is only an eternal present, it lacks depth. Lived, organismic time is
structured by memory, and this is a tree structure (Zeitbaum) (Goppold 2000a). A
memory tree is in current technology implemented as a push down stack (short: a
stack). The question might be asked: is a stack necessary, advantageous or even
essential for operational memory?

When we recall the discussions in (Goppold 2000a) and (Goppold
2001a), we realize that in the operationally closed Universe of
Meta-Patterns of a GNN, there exists no pre-established harmony (Leibniz) of
a clearly defined set of input signals that the device is constructed to react
to and compute upon. To the contrary, an organism constantly re-sets the
threshold values of its input organs in accordance to its internal processes.
One could say that the TM case deals with the easy problem of computation. The
hard problem is, how to establish boundaries between the potentially chaotic mix
of undiscriminate neuronal excitations criss-crossing its neuronal space, that
is, how to separate out the patterns. This is difficult enough for all the
synchronous inputs, but compounds for diachronous ones. A precondition for
memory is diachronous separation of patterns. This means to separate when
(temporally) one pattern begins, and when it ends. Then it comes to the problem
of storing the pattern. At present neurological knowledge, it is unlikely that
such patterns are stored by different single neurons. Since such patterns are
generated by fuzzily connected neuron groups in the first place, that is also
where they are stored. Next, the separation of temporal patterns involves the
difficult problem of where to introduce the threshold values that something is a
(similar) repetition of something that had occurred in the past. The temporal
world is governed by entirely different laws than the spatial one. In the
spatial world, two objects occupying different places, must by definition be
different. But in time, these two instances are possibly different versions,
phases, or transformations of one and the same object. What counts here, is not
equality and unequality, but similarity. The seemingly nonsensical reformulation
of Nietzsche's dictum: "The Infinite Return of the Eternally Unequal" expresses
this fundamental problem. Nietzsche had also remarked that mathematics is
baseless on principal grounds because nothing has ever been the same as anything
else throughout the whole course of the universe. A stack-like organization of
experienced events is indicated by Aristoteles: He worded the truism that
everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. He became more explicit with
his theory of drama, where the buildup, the climax, and the release, is given in
analogy to physical processes of impact and rebound, or dampened oscillations.
The unravelling of superimposed rhythms follows a stack pattern. In our human
experience, the civilatory effects of linear clock time and sequential time
reckoning may mask some deeper stack structures of memory. On one side, it is
easier to remember recent events than long past ones, on the other side, it is
very difficult to recall and recount a longer event sequence backwards in time.

1.2 Computing as Event-Scape Architecture

The main body of the present contribution will deal with
possible repercussions of the technological advances of computing in the
understanding of memory and anticipation that may result in a reorientation of
the philosophical and artistic appreciation of humanity. Following the approach
already taken in the previous contributions, it will illuminate some cultural
depth-structures that seem relevant. Computer programs are in the history of
thought, an unprecedented mass movement involving the design of large
edifices of process patterns, or in other words, we are witnessing the
emergence of a new craft, or art form: Event-Scape Architecture.

1.3 Computing, Temporality and the Textile Arts

Although programmed computing machinery is a phenomenon of the
last 50 years, at least one of the historical roots of computers can be shown to
have a long-standing relation with temporality. Besides the better known
precursors of calculation machines in the line of Pascal, Leibniz, and Babbage,
the other equally important root of computers derives from the loom sequencing
techniques that are commonly associated with the name of Jacquard. The following
is a quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

(Britannica
:
Jacquard): The Jacquard system was developed in 1804-05 by Joseph-Marie Jacquard
(q.v.) of France, but it soon spread elsewhere. Jacquard's loom utilized punched
cards that controlled the weaving of the cloth so that any desired pattern could
be obtained automatically. These punched cards were adopted by the noted English
inventor Charles Babbage as an input-output medium for his so-called analytical
engine and were used by the American statistician Herman Hollerith to feed data
to his census machine. They were also used as a means of inputting data into
digital computers but have now largely been replaced by electronic
devices.

The technology that Hollerith's company was founded on was
ultimately derived from weaving, and computing was more the side line show. Only
some time later, when this company became known as IBM, was computing the main
profit center. Now, the textile technologies have a long-standing intimate
connection with temporality, as is evidenced by the mythologies of braiding,
weaving and spinning women, like the Nornes and Moirae in the
European culture circle, but equally found with world wide distribution in all
cultures of mankind. (Goppold
1999d: 163-167; Goppold
2000a: 4., Goppold 2000f).

The formal algorithmic descriptions of computing and the
actual physical realisations on the machines are two different worlds. It needs
a lot of transformation with compilers to bring these two universes into
commensurability. In the world of integrated circuits of computer chips, packets
of electrons are driven through the twisted mazes of the gates and connection
lines. Since the only things moving on computer chips are electrons, the actual
computation processes taking place in the machinery are about as immaterial as
anything humans have ever created, discounting for a moment the wonderful
edifices that the great religions and idealistic philosophies have erected. The
processes happening on the chips come as close as possible to pure event
patterns, with almost no material counterpart.

Weaving a tapestry may give a common-sense tangible way to
relate what is happening inside the computing machine. To make a textile
representation, we could encode the RAM bytes by colored threads (8bit= 256
colors), and for the ease of calculation, we set 10 threads to one millimeter.
Then we project the RAM number of bytes on the width of a loom, and each step of
the CPU clock would correspond to one thread added lengthwise. The accumulated
changes in different places will display on the finished tapestry. By this, a 64
KB RAM of the olden days would translate into a tapestry of 6.5 m width, about
the largest tapestries ever created. Current day 64 MB RAM would explode that
format with 6.5 km width. But that would yield a very uninteresting tapestry
because there are only minimal changes in single points that are as wide as the
data bus and the CPU registers: 32 to 64 bits= 4 to 8 bytes. The rest is just
uniform stripes. And since program RAM usually doesn't change, most of the
fabric would be the same from beginning to end. This would be a very dull
tapestry, indeed. The main problem with this textile representation is that it
is actually not about event patterns, but a series snapshots of the
machine states.

2 A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art

A more fruitful approach for a suitable graphic representation
could be a reflection of aesthetic and practical concerns analogous to those of
oriental carpets. For this a work by Christopher
Alexander
(1993) will provide the pattern: "A
Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art". The pattern ideas of Christopher Alexander
have already been taken up in the Software Patterns Movement of the OOP
community. (Appleton
(www),
Coplien
(1995, 1998),
Gabriel
(1996), Gamma
(1995), Salingaros
(www)). But the "aesthetics" of
the software patterns created and described in these publications are only "in
the eye of the beholder", burrowed deeply behind the otherwise quite confusing
maze of symbolage that any program in any programming language presents. Only
for the exclusive circle of software engineers who can understand its deep
structure, its "aesthetics" is appreciable. But even for the experts, this comes
only after long and deep "meditation" over the code, which means that the
engineer effectively emulates the machine, and goes through the program steps
one by one, until s/he undestands the problem, and/or the solution, when s/he is
lucky. But every software engineer knows that there are many times when they are
out of luck. On deeper analysis, it becomes apparent that the problem is similar
to the tapestry case given above. The code does not show the event structure of
the program, but only what the machine is supposed to do to produce this event
structure. One main requirement of art is that it contains some way of
transmitting an essence of its artfulness to its appreciators, or in other
words, to evoke an empathic effect in the viewer/listener. One doesn't
need to understand composing theory to be moved by Beethoven's Eroica.
And one doesn't need four years training in art theory and history to have a
memorable impression when visiting the Sistine Chapel. Of course, to be a
real conoisseur, one needs training, but it is not the same training as that
needed to produce the art. So, what is still needed for a 21st Century Art of
Event-Scape Architecture is a clearer representation of the process
patterns.

2.1 Spatial Rhythm: The lost dimension

A comparison with the European Gothic cathedral shows another
aspect of the problem: The cathedral gives us an integrated aesthetic experience
at all levels of magnitude: From the whole monumental building with its arches
and spires at the 100 and 10 m scale, down to the fine detail of the small
rosettas, flower ornaments, and statues, at the 1 m to 10 cm scale. This
integration and balance across four orders of magnitude in scale has been
extensively described by Alexander. Because it is easy to transform the
geometric pattern into a temporal one, we can speak of the spatial rhythm
of a cathedral. By this transformation, the spatial rhythm can evoke the
neuronal reverberation or empathic transmission that was described
in Goppold (2000f). (And this is exactly an essential element that has been lost
to much of contemporary architecture). There is a simple technical reason why
this is so difficult to implement in current SW patterns: the event patterns of
the program are hidden behind the linear-text type arrangement of the
alpanumeric code. It is a problem that programming shares with writing culture
as a whole: to appreciate the work, one has to sequentially step through it. In
SW code, the problem is compounded by the innumerable logical inter-dependencies
of its components.

One observation exemplifies the predicament: All through the
history of SW production, regardless of which programming technique was used,
programmers made mighty efforts to have their programs conform to certain layout
patterns, called "pretty printing", which obviously have nothing to do with the
machine execution of the program, but they are almost indispensable for the
human reading and understanding of it. This "pretty printing" is an attempt to
introduce some of the lost expressive power of visual patterns which can be
taken in with one glance, in the linear-sequential world of the Turing
Machine-governed SW theory.

2.2 Paul Virilio: The Event Landscape - A Perspective over Time

Christopher Alexander
's title: "A
Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art" implies the emergence of a new kind of aesthetic
appreciation, that separates the postindustrial, multimedial civilization now
emerging from the mentality of the mechanized Newtonian age of the 17th through
20th centuries, much as the emerging Renaissance consciousness saw a separation
from medieval mentality. Jean Gebser
had, some 50
years ago, seen this historical pattern, and had drawn up his version of the
"Foreshadowings" of the coming transformation. But he could not yet account for
all the crucial natural science and technological influences on the new type of
consciousness emerging. Especially, he could not envision the effects of the
just-then starting computing movement. His framework of the mental
structure was based on a spatialization of the world, hence the other key
term of his work: the perspectivic mind, which subordinated its world in
the hierarchical framework of spatial visualization. Spatialization of
time was, as we recall, also a main component of Einstein's theory.

Paul Virilio
(1998) has given us
another important document of the new type of consciousness emerging. We may
note, though, that this image is entirely contained within the perspectivic
metaphor which Gebser assumes that the world is breaking away from. It is called
the Event Landscape.

Virilio
(1998,
transl. A.G.): For God, all of history is an event
landscape. For Him there is no succession, because everything is there in the
moment... This hardly imaginable transhistoric landscape extends across all
eons, across all epochs, and from one eternity to the other. And in this hardly
thinkable landscape arise, since the beginning of time, the generations, which
draw contrasted outlines against the horizon of an eternal present... A time
landscape, in which the events are taking the place of a surface pattern... in
which the past and the future are emerging out of one and the same movement, and
their synchronicity is manifesting self-evidently.

This view is the prototypical panoramic perspectivic view from
a high mountain, like that related by Petrarca 1335 from the summit of Mt.
Ventoux (Gebser
1973: 38-45), or that related in the
Bible in Matth 4,3-11 and Luc. 4,3-13. It is the grand panorama over the history
of the universe. It is a perspective that can rightly only be enjoyed by God,
because it is too good for us mere mortals.

2.3 The Hidden Essence of Islam: An Event Landscape?

And this is exactly the type of emotive element, the power
to evoke an empathic effect in the viewer/listener, that was referred to in
the above paragraph, which is a necessary ingredient for our envisioned "Art
Theory of Event-Scape Architecture". The profundity that Christopher Alexander
has embedded in his title "foreshadowing..." comes from a specific aspect
of early Islamic art that the common consciousness in the West probably has
never understood and therefore this essence of Islamic thought was entirely lost
to the Christian world: Its profuse ornamentation. We will remember that the
word algorithm is the modern rendering of the latin word
algorismus which is again an attempt at transliterating the Arabian name
of al-Khwarizmi...

(Britannica
:
Khwarizmi): Khwarizmi, al-,

in full MUHAMMAD IBN MUSA AL-KHWARIZMI (b.
c. 780, Baghdad--d. c. 850), Muslim mathematician and astronomer whose major
works introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concepts of algebra into European
mathematics. He lived in Baghdad under the caliphates of al-Ma´mun and
al-Mu'tasim in the first golden age of Islamic science. His work on elementary
mathematics, Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah ("The Book of Integration and
Equation"), was translated into Latin in the 12th century and originated the
term algebra.

The Kitab al-jabr is a compilation of rules
for arithmetical solutions of linear and quadratic equations, for elementary
geometry, and for inheritance problems concerning the distribution of money
according to proportions. The work was based on a long tradition originating in
Babylonian mathematics of the early 2nd millennium BC and traceable through
Hellenistic, Hebrew, and Hindu treatises. Its elementary and practical nature
contributed to its survival when other works on the same subject were lost.

Another work on Hindu-Arabic numerals is
preserved only in a Latin translation, Algoritmi de numero Indorum
("Al-Khwarizmi Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning"). From the title
originated the term algorithm. Al-Khwarizmi also compiled a set of astronomical
tables, based largely on the Sindhind, an Arabic version of the Sanskrit work
Brahma-siddhanta (7th century AD), but also showing Greek influence.

So much for what is common knowledge, at least for historians
of mathematics and computer science. But here, as usual, the hidden elements are
the most interesting. And this is exactly the foreshadowing element in
the early Islamic art which is being continued with the present title:
"Prolegomena to an Art Theory of Event-Scape Architecture". The historic
phenomenon of the comet-like rise of Islam between 700 and 1200, and the
seemingly unstoppable expansion of the Osman empire up to about 1700, is still
something that the Western mind is unable to understand, to come to grips with,
and there will always remain a shudder and a horror. This especially in the face
of the Islamic revival fires kindled everywhere, provoking the well-founded fear
that the Jihad is not over yet, and it will not be over, not before the whole
world bows in the mosque and prays to Allah. (A similar argument can be found in
Samuel Huntingdon: The Clash of Civilizations).

Unless the Western mind will come to terms with the hidden
essence of Islamic mentality, and for this, Christopher Alexander's theme mey
provide the key. The rather simple-minded descriptions of the Islamic paradise
with its fruit gardens, water fountains, and the houris, the
ever-full-breasted and ever-virginal love-maidens devoted to the warriors fallen
in battle for the true creed, will not do to explain the whirlwind
prairie fire (or Desert Storm?) that the early Islamic movement kindled. The
special character of early Islamic art may give us some more clues. (Critchlow
(1976), Grabar
(1992)). The following needs to be worded
as conjecture: This movement became so intense and immense because it gave the
people an immediate emotive access, through the power to evoke an
empathic effect to the transcendence of God, to "The Event
Landscape", as Virilio called it.

To substantiate the conjecture, perhaps a
Gedankenexperiment may help: Let us assume that we are beholding this
vision, that the pattern of our life's deeds, achievements, miseries, sorrows
and angers, is somewhere there, exactly fitting in with all the rest of the past
and future wheelings and dealings of humanity, in the beautiful composition of
an immense tapestry. And this is exactly what the oriental carpets (especially
those used for prayer), and the richly decorated walls of mosques and official
buildings reflected incessantly. Perhaps it will be easier to understand that
with this permanent, direct and immediate experience, one will gain the
conviction the question of human mortality is a moot one? (See also the similar
issue with pattern immortality in Tipler
(1994)). This would explain the utter death-defiance that the Islamic warriors
displayed in battle (and are still displaying, to remind), even beyond the
simpletons who believed in the houri-paradise.

2.4 Event Landscapes: The 21st Century Art ?

The conjecture spells out that early Islamic art was "A
Foreshadowing of a new 21st Century mode of empathic pattern transmission" that
might become the norm for humanity in the next few hundreds of years. (Such
movements always take a few generations to take hold, even with global
telecommunications, TV and WWW.) The profuse ornamentation we find on all
monuments of Islamic culture reflected a glimpse of that eternal world, of God's
"Event Landscapes", that apparently was being beheld by a substantial fraction
of Islamic humanity at that time. And this glimpse was it that enabled the
fragile humans to overcome the incredible odds which they faced on their march
to spread the faith and to conquer the world. This vision faded and disappeared
when Islam had conquered its part of the world and took its long cultural
decline. But there are strong indications that it is taking its revival now, and
that it is a movement that extends to all of humanity, not just the Islamic
faith.

Let us recapitulate: Islam forbade the pictorial
representation of living animated organisms, the closest of the creations of
God. And necessity is the mother of invention. If you are forbidden to depict
the things themselves, you may come to find ways to express the
characteristic patterns that these things produce, exactly like Virilio
expressed it in the above: "A time landscape, in which the events are taking the
place of a surface pattern". Now the first prize question is: what is the
characteristic of life patterns? Of course their movement, quoting
Aristoteles, whom the Muslims knew in-and-out. And the second prize question is:
how do you project that movement onto the fixating still medium of a
stone wall, a carpet, or a painting, without losing its essence? Now you will
find out that the injunction against depicting living animated organisms is a
great blessing in disguise, because you cannot fixate their aliveness at all in
a writing or painting medium. And by this you evade a deadly trap that the
Christian western cultures have fallen in head-over-feet: to confuse still
pictures of something that was once living with life itself. And western
mentality has not yet been able to get out of this trap.

And by trying really hard, you may come closer to
REality than reality itself. Of course this necessitates a level of
abstraction (we recall that metapatterns impose a definite neuronal
computing cost factor, and abstraction is just another name for
metapattern) that the rest of the world was totally unaccustomed to, and
that apparently could not be maintained by Islamic culture itself, and so it was
lost again. This, in turn will also do its part to explain the towering peak of
abstraction and systematization that Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, and Al Ghazzali
displayed. Thus, we may have to come to grips with a kind of "perspectivic"
revolution in the Islamic world between 700 and 1200, that was totally unlike
the much-touted perspective of the Renaissance, and predated it by about 500
years, and it seems to be the theme of the next upcoming consciousness mutation
of humanity.

3 An Artistic Rendering of Event-Scapes: The Flammarion Picture

An adaptation by the author (A.G.) of the drawing given by
Flammarion in his book "L'atmosphère" may give an indication of the
strange new territory that we have entered, and of the unknown things that await
us there. For more discussion of the influence of the (original) picture of
Flammarion on the neuronal processes of occidental humanity, see Clausberg
(1999: 295 ff.).

The Flammarion
Picture (modification A.G.)

4 Conclusion

The Flammarion Picture makes an allusion to the old
Pythagorean theme of "the music of the spheres" to which one may break through
when one is prepared to leave the familiar world our Mesocosmos. Today,
mathematically formulated science has reached a level of comparably unfamiliar
description of the universe in which we live. Our present-day scientific
challenge is the unravelling of the strange spatio-temporal meta-pattern
structure by which the neuronal "enchanted loom" of our brain weaves the
familiar fabric of our world experience. So, the glass bowl kind of earth
envelope through which the pilgrim in the picture breaks through, is in our
present situation, actually the cave of our skull, into whose machinery we are
now probing. In the last 500 years, scientific, physical time was spatialized
and linearized, and if the indications are not misleading, then the next epoch
will be guided by a different kind of structured time, that of memory and
anticipation, for which we may find models of suitable artistic expression in
the imagery of Islamic Art.